California
California double-time rules for field crews
The hardest state in the country to get right, and the one where getting it wrong is most expensive. California layers daily overtime, double time, a seventh-day premium, meal and rest periods and a split-shift premium on top of the federal weekly rule, and it lets employees enforce most of it themselves.
What the law requires
Double the regular rate for hours past 12 in a workday, and for hours past 8 on the seventh consecutive day of work in a workweek.
What it means on a crew
Storm callouts and emergency jobs are where this bites. A 14-hour day is 8 straight, 4 at time and a half, and 2 at double - not 8 and 6.
What Punchless does
Computed from the measured hours rather than a typed shift length, so a day that ran long produces the double-time automatically instead of depending on someone remembering to flag it.
Every rule we enforce is published with the statute behind it and the test that checks it, so this is a claim you can verify rather than take on faith.
Other California rules
Verified against primary sources on August 3, 2026. Statutes and wage orders change, and some of this is genuinely unsettled - re-check the source before relying on it. Punchless is not a law firm and this is not legal advice.